perplexed

The paper is far, far better than the website, but the owners don't care. They care about making money -- this from a retired editor with over 30 years at the TP and States Item. Let's face the fact that the city and metro area are no longer first rank and never will be again.

You can only shoot a fleeing suspect if your life or the life of someone else is in clear and present danger. For example, if the person fleeing is trying to run over your wife, make sure your aim is good.

There is nothing wrong with the Florida law; there is something wrong in the way it has been so far applied and interpreted.

Don't count on the truth coming out. Attacking another member of the fraternity may occur in some occupations but I am skeptical it would occur here. There is a narrative about urban planning that must be maintained.

Short term planing in response to changes in use and demands are important. There is scant evidence that long term planning does not but fail. It is faddish and fads wane quickly.

What a surprise! Apartments subsidized below market rate are in demand. Of course, if you are an owner of an unsubsidized rental unit, you are scr*wd. How many people will turn down a few hundreds dollars in a gift month after month?

Let the market system determine winners and loser. Let the money follow the student. He/she goes to the school of their choice, private or public. For those public school chauvinists, public schools will win if they provide a better product.

Anyone who would change his or her crime prevention measures because they are not a drug dealing thug would be an idiot. Does Serpas really think this makes people feel safer? If he does, he is not smart enough to be chief.

Sprawl has been going on since before Rome's first suburb. Carrollton and the Garden District were once suburbs and the result of sprawl. The Interstate did not create it. New Orleans population peaked in 1960 before the Interstate system was built, and folks had been leaving to create the suburbs since the end of WWII. The GI bill is more responsible for sprawl than the Interstate system. The city's maximum population was 600,000. The metro area maxed out at 1.2 million. To double the population of the city itself would have required the tearing down of tens of thousands of shotgun doubles and replacing them with mid rise and high rise buildings. Somehow I don't think the urban chauvinists would have enjoyed that destruction.

The biggest problem, imho, with traffic in the area is too few or unimproved arterial streets in JP.

In 1970 the New Orleans CBD was still vibrant enough to find the Clairborne elevated roadway useful. Today it probably could be torn down but that roadway did not clear out the CBD. History did just like it cleared out the CBDs of most cities across America.

No government run housing scheme has worked over the long run, including projects, Sec. 8 and even Fannie and Freddie financing. The unintended consequences always overwhelm any good that is done.

The best thing government can do to promote lower income housing is loosen both zoning restrictions and building codes. That too will have unintended consequences but all policy decisions are trade-offs.

Della, Della, Della. It was the National Socialist Party. It was a collectivist society although more appropriately called a corporatist state rather than socialist. In other words it practiced crony capitalism just like the bailouts of the auto industry, Wall Street and loans to the favored like Solydra.

German had been a social welfare state since Bismark. There is not a lot of difference between fascism and communism. Neither certainly are liberal democracies like we hope America stays. We are slipping, however.

Let's put America back to work the way it has always been done, through free enterprise development. Stop wasting government monies on favored industries and companies and allow the marketplace to pick winners and losers. More winners means more jobs. Put the oil patch back to work to help Louisiana and end the punitive oil and gas regulatory regime initiated to cater to one particular interest group.

Yep, poverty is at an all time high and so is black unemployment. You can mitigate both problems by rejecting the incompetent government manipulation of the marketplace that has run rampant over the last three years and beyond.

The real plan is to get Americans out of cars and in streetcars and buses, living in small, high rise apartments in crowded cities. By forcing us to drive two passenger plastic cars with small electric engines, they just might succeed.

The TP has not yet figured out that the global warming scam has been busted and that fossil fuels are our future for a very long time.

The term I was looking for was "arterial roads". I agree these should have been constructed in St. Tammany, but they could just as easily have have been concentric circular roadways with a the existing roads widened long ago.

The grid pattern certainly worked in places like Plano or Garland or Arlington but those are patterns that never interested past or future residents of St. Tammany and may have been impossible given the problem of flood zones and other land not suited for contiguous development.

The lack of a grid pattern is not a problem or the problem at all. Most feeder roads in western St. Tammany are not crowded at all, just like Carrollton and S. Claiborne during most of the day. They are crowded during rush hour.

The problem is those feeder roads were not widened when they should have been and even when widened, bottlenecks are left like unwidened bridges over small waterways.

Even Causeway Blvd and 190 are not a problem except at rush hour.

Since most of the poorly improved roads are state roadways, the inability of the state to fund construction has been the main roadblock.

The fact is that the average commute to and from work in St. Tammany is 5 minutes longer than in Orleans according to the Census Bureau, but it is current to bemoan suburban sprawl and cutting down trees to build the things people want.

The Master Plan will be the biggest and most costly hinderance to economic development in the history of New Orleans. Long term master plans never work because they require someone in 2050 to do what a bunch of planners at the top thought was a good idea in 2010.

Secondly, the biggest barrier to affordable housing is land use regulations and other regulations that limit the supply of housing.

I would like to know Mr. DeBerry position on the new New Orleans master plan which will indeed limit supply or with codes that make renovation of older NO properties so expensive, it is cheaper to take HUD money to build new.

The jury is still out on mixed income housing but the history of government subsidized housing in America is not encouraging. Projects become instant slums and Sec. 8 destroys functional working class neighborhoods.